Prosperity Gospel à la Ignatius of Antioch

About me

My name is Kyle. I have a blog. I’m delighted that you’ve found you way to it.

I’m from Missouri, and I recently moved to Madison, Wisconsin after almost a decade in Chicago. My current occupation is “student,” and hasn’t been anything else since I was 5. I am writing a dissertation in theology (I study some mix of church history and constructive theology, with a fair amount of Bible thrown in for good measure). I will be happy to tell you about my dissertation some other time. I am a Christian, and a relative newcomer to the Episcopal Church, in which I am discerning a call to priesthood. I’m trying to learn to be both a theology teacher and a pastor, and at least at the moment, it’s a matter of indifference to me which of these two ends up being my full-time job. The great loves of my life (in the order in which I became acquainted with them) are video games, Jesus, Star Trek, the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, beer, and my wife. Were I to order this list by importance or intensity of the love, it would be quite quite different.

The main purpose of this blog is to give me something to write other than my dissertation. Academic prose is a perfectly fine genre, but I tend to go a bit crazy if that’s all I’m doing. I mostly write about religious and theological topics, but I don’t consider this a theology blog (at least not an academic one). I don’t use my full name, though I’ve linked to pages that do. You can easily figure out who I am if you want. But I think of my blog posts as impressionistic. These are thoughts that seemed worth sharing at the time I thought them, not my definitive statement on any particular matter. I’m happy for people to read this blog, link to it, or quote it (with attribution). But this is play, not work. Play in public, but still just play. So I don’t sign my full name.

Curmudgeon? Damn right. Don’t screw with my liturgy, preach vapid theology, or talk in the library. It makes it very difficult to cultivate Christian charity toward you. And difficulty cultivating Christian charity makes me very grumpy. (You do get that that’s a joke, right?)